Not Just Uncivil, But Wrong

Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee is getting a lot of attention for comparing Republicans to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels on the floor of the House during the Obamacare debate. This, obviously, is what Democrats have in mind when they talk about the need for greater civility in political discourse, right?
Just kidding. What is significant, though, is not that Cohen’s attack was uncivil, but rather that it was wrong. He says that Republicans are lying when “[t]hey say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie, just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually people believe it.” But Obamacare is intended to lead to a government takeover of health care. How do we know this? Because Barack Obama says so. He wants a single payer system, a euphemism for socialized medicine, and expects his plan to drive private insurance companies out of business over a period of 15 to 20 years, thereby clearing the field for the federal government. That is what he says, in public:

Obamacare confers plenty of power on the federal bureaucracy to render private health insurance unprofitable, and thereby drive private carriers out of the market. Who, then, will be left? The federal government, just as Obama says he wants.
If there is a Joseph Goebbels on the scene here, it is anyone who says that we should pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain who says his goal is single payer socialized medicine.